Dinesh Karthik and comebacks go hand in hand. The Tamil Nadu wicketkeeper-batter with his never-say-die attitude staged multiple comebacks in Team India at different stages of his career. However, not every comeback story is a fairytale one. Karthik's return to Test cricket in 2018, after an eight-year absence, turned out to be his final chapter in whites.
During a podcast for SKY Sports that included Karthik, Ravi Shastri, Nasser Husain and Michael Atherton, Karthik revisited the moment he unofficially retired from Test cricket. Comparing his exit to that of Nasser Hussain the former India wicketkeeper batsman said that it was then-Indian head coach Ravi Shastri who told him he was done.
"There's not much in common between me and Nass and I'd like to keep it that way. He finished at Lord's. I finished at Lord's. The only difference was that he went and knocked on the coach's doors, saying I think I'm done. In my case, the coach came in and said, 'Don't bother coming in the next Test, you are done," Karthik said, followed by hearty laughs from the panellists.
Shastri, who was sitting right beside Karthik, tapped the 40-year-old on his shoulders.
Dinesh Karthik's final test
After impressing in white-ball formats and scoring heavily in domestic cricket, Karthik was recalled to the Indian Test side in 2018 when Wriddhiman Saha got injured. He played three Tests one against Afghanistan in India and two in England.
But the return didn’t go as planned. In five innings, Karthik managed only 25 runs, including two ducks. His poor outings in Birmingham and at Lord’s led to his exclusion for the third Test, where India handed a debut to young Rishabh Pant. Pant would go on to score a century at The Oval, securing his place as India’s preferred wicketkeeper.
The second Test at Lord’s in that series ultimately became Karthik’s last in red-ball cricket. Though he staged comebacks in white-ball formats later, his Test journey quietly ended there.
